Did the Super Bowl Make Americans Like AI Any More?

Today on the AI Daily Brief, can AI Superbowl ads change what Americans think of AI?

Before that in the headlines, the SaaS Pocca Lips continues.

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions

in AI.

Alright friends, quick announcements before we dive in.

First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Scrunch, Optimizely, and Blitzy, to

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If you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIDailyBreathe.ai.

AIDailyBreathe.ai is also where you're going to find links to pretty much everything

else going on in this ecosystem of projects, new software, new communities, and new initiatives.

For those of you who are paying attention to what we were doing over at AIDB New Years

or 10-week AI New Years Resolution Program, we've got something in a similar vein coming

although a little bit different.

I'm not quite ready to share all the details about it, but the gist is, if OpenAI is going

to agent first work by March 31st, my thinking is why shouldn't the rest of us do the same?

You can sign up to get the first information about that at AIDBTraining.com, and I'm excited

to share what we've got cooking over there.

For now, let's talk about the SaaS Pocca Lips.

Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in

around 5 minutes.

Last week, we talked a little bit about the current state of the markets when it comes

to AI, and now a week gone from that, the so-called SaaS Pocca Lips is absolutely taking

hold as a major investor narrative.

Last week, 400 billion in market cap was wiped out in software.

The iShare software-focused ETF IGV closed last week down 8.7%, compounding as 7.4% lost

the week prior.

Despite a rebound of 3.5% on Friday, the software index is dramatically underperforming the overall

S&P 500.

At least from a market perspective, the death of software has become the first big AI narrative

of the year, and investors are scrambling to make sense of it.

Many are rushing to explain that SaaS isn't going anywhere, and that the notion that large

companies will vibe code their own software is preposterous.

CNBC featured comments from multiple software CEOs who think the narrative is getting way

ahead of reality.

Box CEO Aaron Levy argued that the narrative, quote, someone misunderstands this idea of

where companies tend to spend their resources and their time and energy.

He claims that companies will keep their SaaS subscriptions and look for agents to build

on top of them.

In other words, he said that actually could present an opportunity for the SaaS giants

to evolve their products with AI.

Levy argued that in the 20-year history of cloud software, quote, this is the most exciting

moment we've ever had.

Salesforce CEO Mark Benningoff was singing a similar tune.

Salesforce was, of course, early to the agent theme, with Benningoff claiming that Agent

Force is the fastest growing product in the history of the company.

He also noted that we've got all the customer data so that moat should remain intact.

Still, corporate America is very open to experimentation right now.

The Wall Street Journal spoke with authentic brands, Chief Digital Officer Adam Kronengold,

about how new AI tools are impacting work for the conglomerate that owns Reebok and

Champion.

Remarking on the newly released cloud plugin for legal work, which caused one leg down

in that big dip last week, Kronengold said the company already has software to handle

contract review, but he added, everyone feels very empowered to raise their hand and say,

hey, how can we fold this in?

You get the impression reading the piece that when it comes to customers, there is a feeling

that the friction for experimentation has dropped meaningfully.

Brad Gersner of Altimeter Capital offered an explanation for the dramatic drop in software

stocks even if you don't believe that SaaS is doomed.

Software has been the best performing sector of the S&P for the past two decades on the

back of extremely strong growth.

Gersner argued that forward growth rates are far less clear.

Software had been valued at 30-35X profit implying a long horizon view that SaaS had

multiple decades of overperformance.

If AI contracts that horizon to a single decade, that dramatically changes the trajectory

for these companies.

As Brad put it, AI disruption lowers predictability of future cash flows.

Buko Capital summed it up, say it with me, we only buy accelerating top lines.

Staying on the more nuanced argument theme, one also doesn't have to believe that SaaS

companies are empirically doomed to understand that the traditional seat model is looking

less and less viable.

Most of all, even if they keep the seat model, if companies are slashing their headcount,

SaaS can't sell as many seats.

Or at Goldhaw writes, we used to buy software for humans to use.

Now we buy agents to do the work.

If your product charges by the user, you're selling attacks on productivity.

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was asked in an interview is software dead, he somewhat

obliquely got at this idea that the fundamental business model of software has changed, saying

every company is now an API company whether they want to be or not.

This is most certainly going to be the theme that defines at least the next week in markets,

so one will be watching closely.

Meanwhile, Thompson Reuters has said that AI is delivering tangible benefits for the legacy

legal research firm.

The company was one of the hardest hit from last week's release of the legal plug-in for

cloud co-work.

Their stock fell 20% just last week, and despite Thompson Reuters aggressively having added

AI features across their product suite, it seems that the market doesn't put too much

stock in that.

Despite of that, though, CEO Steve Hasker told investors during last week's earnings call,

we are seeing tangible benefits from our continued investments in AI.

This year they plan to scale up agentic features within the platform and a bid to keep up with

offerings from and product in OpenAI.

Interestingly, their financials were a perfect demonstration that strong results in the present

aren't enough for investors.

Thompson Reuters reported 7% revenue growth and 9% growth in EBITOP profits, with margin

increasing to 44.3%.

With the AI features in their platforms and content licensing contributed meaningfully

to the bottom line, still investors are concerned that legacy software platforms will face inevitable

disruption from the AI startups.

Morningstar maintained their fair value level on the stock, suggesting it's now massively

oversold, while Morgan Stanley slashed their price target by a third.

Rites minimize.

The big question is shifting from will legal gen AI sell to weather pricing power and renewals

hold up as lookalike features spread.

And that uncertainty rises, valuation multiples often compress across the software group, even

for strong incumbents.

Microsoft was another one of the big losers of the software wipeout last week, but they

could be positioned for a comeback as agent strategies take hold.

The stock lost 6.7% losing 218 billion in market cap.

Now unlike most of the software stocks, Microsoft faces dual headwinds.

In addition to the cracks that are forming in their SaaS business model, Microsoft is also

lagging behind the other hyperscalers in their cloud business.

This week's slide and growing competition from the startup labs was an up to trigger

a response from Microsoft's top sales executive.

According to the information, commercial CEO Judson Altoff circulated a memo to sales

staff explaining how the company was positioned relative to open AI's new frontier product.

The memo provided talking points for selling Microsoft's agent management platform, including

specific advantages the product has over open AI's new platform.

Primarily sales representatives were told to emphasize Microsoft's edge in agent security

and compliance.

Now we've been hearing a lot of chatter recently out of Microsoft surrounding the latest

agents launched by the frontier startup labs.

Two weeks ago, for example, the information reported that executives were planning their

response to cloud code.

This included CEO Satya Nadella discussing his experimentation with the product as well

as setting up open claw and encouraging employees to play with the new tools.

Nadella was said to be looking for ways to incorporate the latest agentic features into

GitHub and other Microsoft platforms.

Now it's clear that Microsoft is feeling the pressure to keep up and are making a bet

that they need to keep agent security at the center of their sales pitch.

Which brings us to our final story for today.

Speaking of open claw and security, open claw is partnering with virus total to clean up

the skills library.

Last week, security researchers revealed that skills published to open claw's claw hub were

a cesspit of malware.

An audit found that around 400 skills included malicious code.

These included some of the most popular like LinkedIn job application and YouTube thumbnail

grabber.

Now open claw has partnered with virus total to scan every skill uploaded to their platform

and verify their malware free.

A blog post announcing the initiative reinforced that this won't be a silver bullet.

Rights open claw, virus total scanning won't catch everything, a skill that uses natural

language to instruct an agent to do something malicious won't trigger a virus signature.

A carefully crafted prompt injection payload won't show up in a threat database.

However, they hope the scanning will detect known exploits and suspicious code.

Something that I am quite sure of, after having fully gone non-technical builder in the

last couple of months, is that security engineers are going to be more in demand than just

about anyone I can imagine.

If that's the skill set you have, goodness gracious, is this going to be a good year?

For now, that's going to do it for the headlines.

Next up, the main episode.

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Welcome back to the AI daily brief.

Today we are talking about the AI ads in the Super Bowl, but the reason that this is

deserving of an entire main episode is that ultimately this isn't really a show about

advertising.

Instead, it is a show about public perception and what if anything this advertising did

to change that.

The context coming in is a fairly significant antipathy among the average Americans towards

AI.

A few weeks ago the New York Times published a piece called Why Do Americans Hate AI?

And unfortunately this isn't just media bluster.

To run through just some of the recent statistics around American perceptions of AI, according

to an Edelman study only 32% trusted, a Pew study found 59% have little or no confidence

that companies will develop AI responsibly, also from Pew 52% are more concerned than

excited about AI versus only 10% who are more excited than concerned, Gallup found

that 73% expect AI will cause net job loss, and searchlight found that 51% think AI will

replace not supplement human work.

That of course sets up these Super Bowl ads for a very different task than other advertisers.

The Washington Post got at this question with their piece, can these Super Bowl ads make

Americans love something that they don't like?

Now of course there was always going to be some portion of people who are going to

write this off as the latest example of a bubble and not actually spend any time engaging

with this at all.

However, I continue to believe that while Americans are at this point negatively inclined

towards AI, for the vast majority, this is not some hardened principled position.

This is people rightly understanding that these tools are powerful and indeed powerful

enough that there could be negative implications that they're not sure about.

They're commenting from a place of larger economic anxiety that isn't just about AI, but

which AI feeds into.

They're being asked in a divisive landscape that wants extreme opinions, and one which

tends to drown out the vast majority of middle voices who are just trying to figure things

out.

So the question is how did these ads do with that set of middle voices, not the people

determined to hate AI and not the people who are already sold on it, but the group which

I consider the vast majority who are still trying to figure out what it's going to mean

for them.

By AdWigs calculations, 23% of the ads were either for AI companies or highlighted the

way that they used AI in their production.

So let's go through and see how some of them did and what they might have meant for

these broader perception issues.

Let's follow up first on in-prope, given that we covered it last week.

Summarizing my points for those of you who missed that rant?

The ads for those of you who didn't see it all start with someone using AI to get advice

about something that they're trying to achieve or something that they're trying to do, which

starts benign enough, but eventually turns into a sales pitch for some product.

The tagline, at least the one that was released last week on social, was ads are coming

to AI but not to clawed.

This was of course a swipe at OpenAI, who had announced that ads were coming to chat

CBT.

Like everyone else, I thought that the ads were well done and that they were funny.

If you have the proper context, my critiques of them were two part.

First, from an effective advertising perspective, while these killed on social for people

who were enfranchised enough to actually know that OpenAI had announced that ads were

coming, I thought that they were going to be incredibly confusing for the average person

who had no idea.

It would be different if for the last three months people had been complaining about ads

in chat CBT, but that's just not the case, which led to my second complaint.

Because people wouldn't have that context, it felt to me like the vast majority of people

who did enjoy this were going to be those who interpreted it as a critique of AI in general.

Think about what the ad says if you don't know that it's trying to go after chat CBT.

It's people with genuine concerns and challenges in their life, vulnerable turning to AI, only

for it to turn around and try to sell you something.

The point it's making then, at least to that perception, reinforces the idea that AI

is just the latest thing from tech billionaires to separate you from your money in time.

So how did they land?

The short answer is not that well.

From ad week, early audience response suggests the message struggled to land.

According to an iSpot survey of 500 viewers, the ads like ability score placed it in the

bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the past 5 years.

Last top two box purchase intent scored 24% below Super Bowl norms and 19% below ads

in its category that aired over the last 90 days.

Viewers most commonly describe their reactions as WTF, signaling confusion around both the

message and the execution.

So there you have it.

Legability in the bottom 3% compared with Super Bowl ads over the last 5 years is not

something to be proud of.

Now one cool thing from Claude was that they added live sports scores and stats into the

app.

Now this is the type of feature that 100% is not for me, but to the extent that you are

trying to turn your chat bot into a portal to connect to the rest of the internet, this

for some users could be really valuable.

Rob Hayesfield said, wait, why didn't Anthropic put this in their Super Bowl ad?

Tech publication TbPN tried to have some fun with it, running a spoof where they offered

Claude with ads.

Now, we also talked last week about how open AI had bit back pretty hard on social, calling

Anthropics ad all sorts of dishonest, but they hadn't yet revealed their Super Bowl

ad.

The tagline of this ad was you can just build things.

The ad focuses on the hands of the subject, and as a bunch of smash cuts to short vignettes

of people doing stuff, making a marble track building electronics, answering in class, installing

Linux creating a pigment for painting, playing chess, working on robotics, getting their

apple on the flash through luminary geniuses like Alan Turing, Grace Hopper and Albert Einstein.

The ad was not just codex coded, it was codex branded.

Open AI-CMO Kate Roush wrote, we're living through a time when people can build things

that were previously out of reach.

The message is around participation, agency, and leaning in to use these tools to do things

you just couldn't before.

Re-enforcing the reframe that we've been living through and documenting on this show

she added, now AI is not only answering your questions, but is going to do things on

your behalf.

Roush described codex as a sign of material change underway in the industry.

Now, the funny thing is, I think that if you had shown AI people this ad a couple of

months ago without the ending, a majority of them would have bet it was for Claude code

rather than for codex.

But that's not where it landed, and so the question is, how did people receive it?

At age basically said it was open AI trying to position ChatsyBT as the Kleenix of AI,

in other words, ChatsyBT just being synonymous with AI, so taking advantage of the brand

positioning they already had to make kind of a more highfalutin ad.

Generally the response I saw to it was fairly positive if benign.

I saw it on some lists as the top ranked of the AI ads, although I think the highest

placement I saw was maybe the New York Times list had it at 17th best out of the total

66.

Before others it was fine but forgettable but ultimately a positive vision of the future.

Now, one crazy wrinkle on everything was that after the ad came out, this post popped

up on Reddit that was purportedly from a disaffected open AI staffer who said that this ad was

actually a last minute replacement for an ad that would have teased open AI's device.

At first they showed just a screenshot of what looked like Alexander Skarsgard looking

at a weird tabular thing, and then a few minutes later an entire 30 second ad appeared.

It indeed appeared to be Alexander Skarsgard with some weird chrome ear things, pressing

a shiny chrome device and looking confusedly at it.

Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian said, the ad is beautiful, they should have run this one.

But apparently it was all just an elaborate hoax.

The Verge writes, whoever was behind this hoax had been working on it for some time and

approached spreading their story on multiple fronts.

Analyst Max Weinbach got messages about it a couple of weeks ago, an ad age reporter

Gillian Follett wrote,

a fake headline is circulating on X that falsely claims to be my reporting.

I did not write that story and neither I nor ad age has published a piece saying open

AI changed its Super Bowl ad.

Open AI, CMOK, Rochigan responded, fake headline and entire fake website claiming we changed

our Super Bowl ad at the last minute, someone going to a lot of trouble.

Honestly, I do not know what to make of this one and what the incentive for someone to create

this entire ad and back in campaign was.

Maybe we'll learn over time, but for now just a weird wrinkle in this overall story.

Moving on, Microsoft and Meta both tried to tailor their AI pitch to the sports crowd.

Microsoft's ad actually wasn't specifically produced for the Super Bowl, but was part

of a larger campaign around co-pilot.

And it's an ad all about how co-pilot helped NFL teams and players make better decisions

through its ability to process lots of data.

Fairly unremarkable, but at least unbranded with the setting.

Meta's ad focused on the Oakley version of their smart glasses.

It opens on Marshawn Lynch asking the AI to play as Beast Mode playlist, then progresses

through a series of users making other requests of the assistant that included Spike Lee

and streamer I show speed.

Interestingly, Fortune suggested that this ad wasn't really aimed at the consumer.

Kimberly Whitler, an associate professor at the University of Virginia said, they're

not just communicating to consumers, they're also communicating to investors who watch

these ads.

They're reinforcing this kind of view that the company is very innovative.

I don't know, man.

I think that Meta has recognized that although certain parts of their AI strategy haven't

gone so well, they are in a unique position when it comes to these wearables and that there's

a lot of use cases for AI glasses, like the ones they show here, where the glasses just

do things for you as you're living your life at high speed that might appeal to regular

people.

I think the ad does a good job playing to Meta's strengths in this area and fitting in

with the larger Super Bowl vibe.

Now, the AI ad that had the most to claim was the ad from Google focusing on Gemini.

In it, it shows a mom and a son getting excited about their new house.

They're taking images of the raw potential and imagining what it could be in the future

thanks to the help of Gemini.

Google is historically one of the few Super Bowl advertisers that's actually daring enough

to try to move out of the tried and true patterns of funny to pull on the heartstrings and

they've gotten pretty good at it.

It's a sweet ad and I guarantee that if you're a parent, it would have made you feel something.

Because the point is it's not really about AI.

It's about how AI can be a part of a crazy journey of life.

Artificial Nightmares wrote, Google really killed it with their Super Bowl ad.

Clear, concise, human, and it instantly showed you the value of their product and why

you need it with a real-world example.

Every's Dan Shipper wrote, low-key Google had the best AI Super Bowl commercial for consumers,

actually good at pitching the product and explaining why you might use it.

Now one company that went in the exact opposite direction and decided to play on and simultaneously

validate and also normalize and make fun of fears of AI taking over was Amazon's Alexa

ad with Chris Hemsworth.

In it, Chris Hemsworth comes in to see a new Alexa Plus in his house, only to freak out

and describe all the ways that it might try to kill him, which are then, of course, hilariously

documented in the rest of the ad.

Andrew Don Twitter writes, honestly brilliant marketing, everyone else is trying to sound

safe and serious, Amazon just goes, we know what you're thinking.

Now my guess is this one is going to be pretty divisive, with some people not appreciating,

Amazon making light of a fear that actual people have, but I think running all the way

in this opposite direction is actually a strategy with some merits and opened up a lot of really

funny territory for them.

Now what's interesting is that it wasn't just the big guys running ads as well.

Hemsworth apparently decided around Christmas to do an ad and their agency put it together,

of course, with the help of AI in just five weeks.

The ad featured historic slacker Matthew Broderick, subtly making a nod to his first

pure character, walking through an office and explaining how Hemsworth could give everyone

the day off.

It makes slides, it does some Excel work, with the idea to make clear AI's time-saving

benefits.

I saw a couple reputable lists, think it was the most effective of the AI ads, but there

are also a lot of people who felt like Stephen Breach on Twitter who wrote, this is pretty

much telling our employers they don't need us anymore, question mark, question mark,

question mark.

The Gensbark social account responded, saying, get the concern, but it's actually the opposite.

AI doesn't replace us, it handles the grunt work so we can focus on the creative strategic

stuff that actually matters.

Even better, it gives us time to build something of our own.

That's the future we're excited about.

Stephen for his part wasn't buying it, saying, this sounds like the AI response.

Now vibe-coding toolbase 44 now, part of Wix, came at the same theme of you can just build

stuff that OpenAI did, but in a much more direct way.

And there ad they show people in an office, discovering delightedly that they can build

apps that weren't possible before.

For my money, this was easily the most underrated of the AI ads.

First of all, unlike the Gensbark ad, it's not showing AI doing people's core work,

it's showing how they can have new capabilities that weren't possible before.

In that way, it's inherently empowering.

Second, the ad is just straight funny, the stuff that they build creates a lot of room

for humor.

The tagline, it's app to you, lands, and I just think it was an actually good spot.

Now, we're getting along, but there are just two more that we need to talk about.

The first is from Svedka, who proudly declared that they had made the first fully AI-generated

Super Bowl ad ever, and people were not super impressed to put it mildly.

The ad features, honestly, the only way to put it is horror movie robots, chugging Svedka,

dancing at a rave, with the tagline, shake your bots off.

AI filmmaker PJ A's wrote, I would not be proud of this, lol.

In fairness, we're talking about it, but God, it sucks.

That I think is fairly consensus-view, so I'll just move on to our last spot, which

is from AI.com.

Now, AI.com didn't exist until very recently.

The origin story is that the founder of Crypto.com spent $70 million to buy the domain, making

it, I believe, the most expensive domain purchase of all time.

The ad said people to AI.com to claim their handle and launch their own AI assistant,

which enough people did that it crashed their website.

This was the icing on the bubble cake.

Michael Podluski writes, Crypto guys, no AI background, buy AI.com for $70 million,

burn $10 million on a Super Bowl ad, slogan accelerating the arrival of AGI, ask you

for a credit card right away just to claim a handle, website looks like a cheap five-coated

mess, crashes instantly with a 504 gateway timeout.

This looks like the absolute peak of the AI bubble.

And find maybe so, but the part that I most took notice of was this line.

Turns out it's just a thin open-claw wrapper.

And indeed, founder and CEO Chris on Twitter, in his post, AI.com is now live in beta, writes

AI.com is the world's first easy to use and secure implementation of open-claw, the open-source

agent framework that went viral two weeks ago.

We made it easy to use without any technical skills while hardening security to keep your

data safe.

Even in a world that moves fast, the fact that open-claw went from non-existent to part

of a Super Bowl ad in three weeks has got to be some kind of record.

So ultimately, could these Super Bowl ads make Americans love something they don't

like?

Honestly, I'm not really sure.

There were highlights and lowlights, but I guess overall it could have been a lot worse,

so maybe we'll call that a win.

For now that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief, appreciate you listening or

watching as always, and until next time, peace!